20 More Days

11/03/2014 12:09

If you have been wondering where I have been for the past month, I have been mostly behind a pile of paper and errands as I am applying to the JET Program. There is a lot involved into this application and thus far I have collected over 100 pages to send them as part of my application. I am nearly complete in the process at this point. All that is left is to have my statement of purpose essay completed. The deadline that my application has to be in the hands of the administrator is November 14th, 5:00pmEST. This is NOT a post mark date, they litterally need to have it in their office by that date or before. I have submitted my online portion of the application already, which creates a profile of me that they can just check off that they have received everything. Then they will send me confirmation once all the documents have been received. I hope that I can get my essay finished this week. I want to send everything no later than Monday as the following day is veteren's day.

Anyhow, I have been working for AECP, doing homework, teaching, and observing instructors. Today I actually have a test that I have no idea how to study for. We are taking a test on a classic Japanese book by Natsume Souseki called Kokoro. Kokoro means heart or feeling in Japanese. And not the physical heart. That is shinzou, but the shape and metaphorical heart. If you have not read that book I highly recommend it. It is one of the most iconic Japanese novels in the world. And English translation will not be hard to come by.

In said class, we have read the novel in its entirety in English, then read major portions of it in Japanese and translated it. Now we are having our first test of the semester in that class and the teacher informed us that there will only be 4 sentences that we have to translate into English. We translated hundreds of sentences and now he is telling us only to worry about 4 of them? How does one study for this test? We had no vocabulary assigned to study, most of the words we are assumed to know the meaning to, and we had no grammar lesson. If there were grammar points that came up where we did not understand anything, then he would tell us what it meant and move on. This only happned about 3 or 4 times throughout the semester. I am basically complaining, but seriously. The entire syllabus schedule said the class was going to focus on Kokoro and would take the entire semester to do so. Now we have finished with Kokoro and the instructor has no idea what he will do now. He has stated those words to us numerous times. After the test, he is going to have us watch a movie in class the next meeting time cuz he has no idea what to do. Granted, this is his first time teaching, but he should still have had a better sense of what to do rather than asking us what to do.